About

In Q4 2001 Amazon posted its first profit. In November of the same year Deep Current founder Mark Pape decided to shift career paths from Civil Engineering to the far more innovative Information Technology space, more accurately he chose the art of marketing on the internet. This also gave him more time to surf in his hometown,  Durban.

From 2001 to 2017, Deep Current grew from a pure web design agency to a full spectrum of in-house agency services including digital marketing strategy, website & domain hosting, website development (Drupal 5+), UX/UI design, mobile app development, mobile responsive (& adaptive) design, social media marketing & management, email marketing, sms marketing, USSD mobile interactions, eCommerce and QR Code solutions. This was only possible thanks to a long list of great team members!

In 2003, the idea of tracking print media spend using SMS was born. The mobile digital product iSend was developed by Thusa and brand designed by Mark Hansel. iSend was launched in 2006 in its first campaign with TBWA & TOPS SPAR. Today clients such as EDUCOR depend on the service, over 13 years later.

In 2017, Mark chooses to look at new ways of offering value to clients and this meant a change in business model to a product focused agency… aiming at driving business innovation through new product development. To effect this change Mark has formed a distributed team of trusted specialist companies to collaborate with. 

In 2019, Mark receives his MicroMasters in Digital Product Management (Boston University) 

From 2020 to 2021, Mark receives his hard earned MicroMasters in Data Science & Statistics (MIT).

In 2023, Deep Current completes a major product build for the HSRC after 1.5 years in development. The ‘Spatial Tax Data portal’ launched in June with economists describing the portal as a breakthrough in spatial statistics.